“You could choose to do that,” she agreed. “And I could choose to punch you back. It wouldn’t be a wise move on your part, since I am much bigger than you.”
“You’re a nun. You aren’t allowed to punch anyone.”
“I’m a nun, but I’m also human. We humans make mistakes. Am I likely to punch back? Probably not. No guarantee. So, Quinn, you make your choice and you take your chances. Take a swing at me if you really think it’ll make you feel better.”
The rain fell harder, as if granting my wish, and the world beyond the window appeared to begin flooding, melting. Suddenly I was crying. I had wept alone in my room, but now it was happening right out in the open. I kept my back to her, tried not to make a sound, just let the tears flow until there were no more. If she came to me and tried to console me, I would punch her as hard as I could because I didn’t want to be comforted, not with Litton dead.
After a silence broken only by the susurration of the rain and the creaking of her chair as she shifted in it, she said, “Nature is a place of constant competition between individuals in a species, and between one species and another. In this broken world, animals aren’t able to rise above violence. But people have the ability to forsake it. People should. People must. But that is our work, Quinn. Not nature’s and not God’s.”
“But why?” I said when I could at last speak.
“Perhaps the birds will teach you what the ants couldn’t. We will study birds together.”
So the subject became birds. Sister Theresa provided DVD documentaries and books. We sat in the park and watched the crows, the doves, the sparrows. She took me to a university to spend two hours with an ornithologist in his research aviary, where there were more birds of different kinds than I had ever seen before, although only a tiny fraction of the more than a thousand species that exist worldwide.
We studied their feathers. A simple sparrow has thirty-four different kinds of feathers. Every member of a species is feathered exactly the same as every other member.
We studied different ways that species build their nests. Every individual within a single species builds in the very same manner. They raise their offspring by precisely the same rules, and with entirely predictable results.
We studied species that fly in formation. We studied species that don’t fly in formation but that, in a flock of hundreds, will change direction in the same instant.
We studied what they feed on and how they find food. Every member of a species sustains itself with the same food and seeks it in the same manner as the others of its kind.
I was repulsed by the fact that owls sometimes eat smaller birds, as do some raptors like hawks and falcons. I called them “cannibals.”
Nothing I learned seemed to explain what any of these things had to do with human violence or with why it was allowed in a world that had supposedly started out as a paradise named Eden.
As with the ants, Sister Theresa would not tell me what lesson I was supposed to learn. “You have to realize the truth on your own, believe it, accept it—or otherwise it is just something you’ve been told that you don’t trust to be true. Next, we’ll study fish.”
PART 3
WHAT THE SEER SAW
|?19?|
I had not returned to Peptoe since being sent to Phoenix in the first week of my life, because I’d been too busy being an orphan and then earning a living in the cutthroat world of regional magazines. Months before I met the Rainkings, however, I’d researched Peptoe without going there, preparing a file to justify eventually visiting the town for a few days on the dime of Arizona! magazine. I hoped to write a story about being abandoned on my third day of life and perhaps learn something, however little, about my origins.
From Tucson, the way to Peptoe was via I-10 east, then by an undivided federal highway, then along another undivided highway, across saguaro flats, across playas dry and cracked at that time of year, between mountains as stark as rough-forged iron, through lands where blood had been spilled in tribal wars of which history made little note, where through at least a thousand years many slaves were kept and suffered, their grim ordeal and existence now long forgotten or at least left unremarked in the interest of addressing more recent outrages. The only way to Peptoe was through human history in all its striving and conniving, mercy and meanness, nobility and ignobility, despair and hope.
The town was not a town, not officially, but one of those odd settlements that form like rust on iron, less by intention than by some process of nature that no one has yet been granted government funds to study. Those who made it their home were for the most part people who found crowded cities unnatural and any large government Orwellian, but were likewise averse to the intimacy of small towns and the officious nature of village councils. The citizens of Peptoe and places like it wanted to have neighbors, though at a respectful distance, which meant cheap land. They wanted a sense of community, but mostly they wanted to live their lives with as few annoyances as possible, beyond the easy reach of thought police and sanctioned con men of all kinds.